Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [25]
So I run. Do I run! Having spent maybe two fretful minutes with her—two minutes of my precious time, even though just the day before, the doctors stuck right up her dress (so I imagined it, before my mother reminded me of “the knife,” our knife) some kind of horrible shovel with which to scoop out what had gone rotten inside her body. They reached up and pulled down out of her just what she used to reach up and pull down out of the dead chicken. And threw it in the garbage can. Where I was conceived and carried, there now is nothing. A void! Poor Mother! How can I rush to leave her like this, after what she has just gone through? After all she has given me—my very life!—how can I be so cruel? “Will you leave me, my baby-boy, will you ever leave Mommy?” Never, I would answer, never, never, never … And yet now that she is hollowed out, I cannot even look her in the eye! And have avoided doing so ever since! Oh, there is her pale red hair, spread across the pillow in long strands of springy ringlets that I might never have seen again. There are the faint moons of freckles that she says used to cover her entire face when she was a small child, and that I would never have seen again. And there are those eyes of reddish brown, eyes the color of the crust of honey cake, and still open, still loving me! There was her ginger ale—and thirsty as I was, I could not have forced myself to drink it!
So I ran all right, out of the hospital and up to the playground and right out to center field, the position I play for a softball team that wears silky blue-and-gold jackets with the name of the club scrawled in big white felt letters from one shoulder to the other: S E A B E E S, A.C. Thank God for the Seabees A.C.! Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can’t imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space … Do you know baseball at all? Because center field is like some observation post, a kind of control tower, where you are able to see everything and everyone, to understand what’s happening the instant it happens, not only by the sound of the struck bat, but by the spark of movement that goes through the infielders in the first second that the ball comes flying at them; and once it gets beyond them, “It’s mine,” you call, “it’s mine,” and then after it you go. For in center field, if you can get to it, it is yours. Oh, how unlike my home it is to be in center field, where no one will appropriate unto himself anything that I say is mine!
Unfortunately, I was too anxious a hitter to make the high school team—I swung and missed at bad pitches so often during the tryouts for the freshman squad that eventually the ironical coach took me aside and said, “Sonny, are you sure you don’t wear glasses?” and then sent me on my way. But did I have form! did I have style! And in my playground softball league, where the ball came in just a little slower and a little bigger, I am the star I dreamed I might become for the whole school. Of course, still in my ardent desire to excel I too frequently swing and miss, but when I connect, it goes great distances, Doctor, it flies over fences and is called a home run. Oh, and there is really nothing in life, nothing at all, that quite compares with that pleasure of rounding second base at a nice slow clip, because there’s just no hurry any more, because that ball you’ve hit has just gone sailing out of sight … And I could field, too, and the farther I had to run, the better. “I got it! I got it! I got it!” and tear in toward second, to trap in the webbing of my glove—and barely an inch off the ground—a ball driven hard and low and right down the middle, a base hit, someone thought … Or back I go, “I got it, I got